Agamemnon, waiting with his army for a fair wind for Troy, sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, to appease the gods. That act sets in motion a blood-will-have-blood intrigue that throws Mycenae’s House of Atreus into turmoil and evokes moral issues that inspired all three tragic dramatists of ancient Athens: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

Iphigenia in Tauris, as a priestess of Artemis, sets out to greet her brother, Orestes, and his friend, Pylades; fresco from Pompeii, 1st century C.E. (Naples National Archeological Museum, courtesy May Lan Nguyen via Wikimedia Commons)

Here, Tóibín has departed from the script in an always riveting but occasionally portentous narrative, and the result is a mixed success. As befits its sources, House of Names offers plenty of deep themes, and these intense, jittery Mycenaean royalty have enough ambitions, fears, and rough edges to give those themes superb scope. The story, though familiar, feels fresh, partly through reinterpretation, but largely because Tóibín knows how to evoke corners and wrinkles of character that add tension. Even though you know what happens next, you have room to hope that it won’t go that way, and he subtly encourages this delusion until it’s too late.

The novel opens with Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s queen, narrating how her husband lures her and their daughter, Iphigenia, to his camp on the pretext that the girl was to marry Achilles. I like this section very much. Not only does Tóibín craft the warrior king into a weakling, a vacuous coward who can’t even bring the news himself, an unspeakable father to a daughter who adores him, the women attempt to resist and are crushed as if they were insects. The feminist message comes through loud and clear, but there’s more.

Clytemnestra, whom literature has long stereotyped as a bloodthirsty fiend who knows nothing beyond her treasonous lusts and desire for revenge–a misogynistic portrait, if ever there was one–receives a measure of rehabilitation in House of Names. It’s not just that Tóibín plumbs how deeply her daughter’s sacrifice shakes her emotionally. It’s that the brutality pushes her to declare, privately, that if the gods in fact demanded Iphigenia’s death–which Clytemnestra doubts–that only proves their irrelevance.

I know as no one else knows that the gods are distant, they have other concerns. They care about human desires and antics in the same way that I care about the leaves of a tree. I know the leaves are there, they wither and grow again and wither, as people come and live and then are replaced by others like them. There is nothing I can do to help them or prevent their withering. I do not deal with their desires.

But this being the House of Atreus, Clytemnestra doesn’t stop at philosophy. She swears revenge and spends the years of her husband’s absence planning how to carry it out. When Agamemnon finally comes home from Troy, Clytemnestra murders him and gives out that a rebel faction within the palace was responsible. To accomplish this, she has enlisted Aegisthus, a powerful, unscrupulous man who has own scores to settle, and, she finds, no desire to share power or anything else except her bed–and others’. Clytemnestra has miscalculated by a long shot.

And that too is a theme–how, when killing starts, it doesn’t stop. Electra, her younger daughter, swears revenge in turn, and from her narrative sections, you see that she too wants power. Whereas Clytemnestra loved Iphigenia and, once, her husband, Electra doesn’t seem to love anybody. But she hates her mother, to the point that she blames her for Iphigenia’s death. Clytemnestra has done serious wrongs, but Electra’s approach tells you that two wrongs don’t make a right.

Amid all them is Orestes, Clyemnestra’s son, who grows up an exile and yearns to return home. Again, unlike the classic treatment, this Orestes isn’t a natural leader, an outraged son who demands his birthright. In fact, he’s a born follower and wants to do right, whatever that might be. He has only two desires–to find love and not to be shunted aside. His is the saddest, most poignant perspective in the novel, a balance to the mayhem in which he must participate.

Having loved Nora Webster–and held up its prose as a model for my own writing–I’m startled to say that Tóibín’s style in House of Names fails to measure up. The language seems excessively formal, and therefore often distant; for instance, the author never uses contractions and often adds needless prepositional phrases that make people sound pompous. Sometimes, they speak as if they knew a scribe were in the room, taking dictation for posterity. The rhythm, too, becomes annoyingly noticeable in places, as with the short, choppy sentences in Clytemnestra’s voice.

But my biggest complaint, one that surprises me, is the sheer number of “he felt, she felt.” Tóibín didn’t do that in Nora Webster, a novel remarkable for its artistry in conveying inner life through subtext and by inference, with nary a cliché. Compare that with an example here, “He veered between feeling brave and feeling nervous,” and you see the difference.

As a novel of ideas and a retelling of a powerful story, House of Names is worth reading. But it’s disappointing, nevertheless.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Musashi Miyamoto, the young protagonist of this absorbing, far-ranging novel (and a real seventeenth-century figure), walks away after the battle of Sekigahara, determined to live. For this revolutionary decision, which the samurai code calls the height of dishonor, Musashi becomes an outlaw.

Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor for Doubleday.

Three transgressions make the young man’s life forfeit. First, he fought for a lord on the losing side, for which Musashi should have committed seppuku, ritual suicide. However, he’s long detested that custom and goes into hiding instead. Second, he’s accused of having insulted a warrior from a powerful clan whom he slew in single combat, a charge he denies, to no avail. Thirdly, and most significantly, he announces to all and sundry that seppuku is criminal nonsense; that the samurai code, known to initiates as “the Way,” is morally false; and that any man who kills for a cause other than his own–as when a lord commands him to–is a coward. Not content with that, Musashi takes these views on the road, trying to prevent seppuku when he happens across it, and fending off the samurai despatched to kill him.

In other hands, perhaps, this arresting premise would merely provide excuses for grisly combat, of which there’s no shortage here, or an adventure story that makes the pages turn rapidly, as these do. But Kirk has much bigger psychological, political, and moral game in mind, and his epic sweep, focus on justice, and using a specific case to portray an entire society remind me of Kurosawa films like Rashomon or Seven Samurai. Throughout the novel, characters constantly challenge themselves and others to define what the purpose of violence is, and what an individual person is to make of that.

As a fellow fugitive from the Way haltingly observes:

What difference, what individual difference, did you and I make at Sekigahara? . . . Yet our army lost, and so we two must bear the shame. To be hated. What if our army had won? We would be loved, and yet we would have had the exact same effect upon the victory. Would have had . . . what we had before. But magnified. And what would we have done to earn it? Nothing. No. No. It is as though we . . . as though human beings are . . . buckets or, or, or . . . vessels.

Yet nothing’s so simple. Musashi sees no other choice–indeed, he seeks no other–than to prove by the sword that the Way is bankrupt. The contradiction is obvious, but not to Musashi, who believes he’s honest because he fights only for himself and his ideals. He assumes that each martial victory will convince other samurai to abandon the Way, and he’s astounded when they respond by trying to attack him.

But there’s more. The samurai sent to kill him, Akiyama, is himself an outcast, and Kirk exploits that, leading Akiyama to question why he’s been sent on this mission, and what, precisely, is the moral threat that his quarry represents. Along the way, Musashi lands with a blind woman and a young girl who challenge his assumptions, and among whom he becomes a different person from the raging swordsman who enjoys the combat at which he’s preternaturally gifted.

Is there yet more? Yes, there is. Musashi’s quest brings him to Kyoto, where an uneasy peace simmers with conflict. The Tokugawa Shogunate, the victors of Sekigahara, have moved the capital to Edo (modern-day Tokyo) and left behind a military governor. Many people in Kyoto resent the Tokugawa for that, perhaps none more than the Yoshioka, a famous samurai school. It’s their champion whom Musashi allegedly insulted at the battle, and they’re a political power in the city. Staying out of trouble is therefore a full-time job for Musashi, and he’s no good at it.

Sword of Honor follows Child of Vengeance, which I reviewed December 8, 2014. Each stands on its own, though the precursor shows how Musashi has always had a dual nature, with healing impulses as well as violent ones. Sword of Honor is a deeper, more proficient novel, though, and I’m glad to see that Kirk has taken to showing his characters’ emotions more often than telling them, a flaw that marred the previous book at times. I could have done with fewer, less grisly battle scenes, but none seemed gratuitous, and there’s no denying that the samurai world, as with any knightly class, was based on violence.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher, in return for an honest review.

Review: The Day of Atonement, by David Liss
Random House, 2014. 365 pp. $28

“Only a few hours in Lisbon, without even setting foot on land, and I had set things in motion,” says Sebastian Foxx, the protagonist of this revenge tale, set in 1745. “These people–my enemies–already danced upon my string. Unless I dangled upon their rope. That was also a possibility.”

It’s an accurate judgment, and for virtually the entire novel, neither Sebastian nor the reader can ever be sure whether a dance or a dangle is taking place, or who’s in control. All you do know is that Sebastian isn’t who he says he is, and that merely by entering Lisbon, he may be arrested, tortured, and killed any hour. Ditto the people he’s trying to help.

His real name is Sebastião Raposa, and to the Inquisition, he’s a heretic. Yes, the Inquisition still rules in 1745, and, as described in The Day of Atonement, its agents are a frighteningly efficient eighteenth-century Gestapo, except that they wear priestly robes instead of leather coats and trilbys. Their goal is to rid the city of New Christians–families that converted from Judaism generations before but forever suspect as nonbelievers–and to seize their property. The accusations are false, but that doesn’t matter. Under torture, the victim confesses and names accomplices.

Seal of the Inquisition. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

When Sebastião was thirteen, someone had heard that his family was saving up money to flee this impossible trap, and charged them with heresy. Sebastião’s parents spirited him out of the country, but they remained to endure imprisonment and death. He landed in England, under the care and tutelage of Benjamin Weaver, former pugilist and current thief hunter, whom Liss fans know from other novels.

Now, as Sebastian Foxx, the young man has returned to his forefathers’ Jewish faith, and, in Lisbon, to kill his family’s accusers and the Inquisitor responsible for their deaths. He also dreams of finding Gabriela, his first love, whose family was denounced at the same time as his, and to return to England with her. What a mad, pointless scheme; as an old Lisbon friend tells him, taking on the Inquisition “is like taking revenge against the ocean to avenge a drowning.”

However, Sebastian doesn’t care what happens to him and feels no fear (or much of anything else), so numbed is he by his emotional losses. Fueled by fury, he’s a dangerous rival, capable of violence to a degree that startles everyone, even his mentor.

Nevertheless, he also means to do right, which makes The Day of Atonement a moral tale as well as a thriller, an exploration of the use and misuse of violence. While trying to decide who’s a villain, he acquires more victims to rescue, who also suffer as a result, giving him further sins to expiate. Hence the title: Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, requires more than fasting, prayer, and reflection. To obtain forgiveness, the penitent must seek it from the person he has wronged. Sebastian believes that if he can atone properly–free himself of his anger and right great wrongs–he can be whole again.

I like this setup, and Liss carries its promise to conclusion. He knows how to string out a confrontation, letting the tension rise and fall, only to rise again, in a way you hadn’t anticipated. I think of this as a kind of “no–and furthermore ,” in which a character supposes he’s getting somewhere, only to find out he’s not–and, furthermore, winds up in worse trouble. Whether it’s a twist of circumstance, a betrayal, or an unexpected task to fulfill, Liss piles on the “no–and furthermores” until you have no idea what’s flying, precisely Sebastian’s viewpoint.

A couple of the violent scenes (and there are many) seem Hollywood to me, and Sebastian passes through an emotional transition or two that appear too easy. Even so, of the six David Liss novels I’ve read, The Day of Atonement is my favorite since The Whiskey Rebels (2008).

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.

More fine print: This week and next, I’ll be on vacation, so will post only once each week.

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Damyanti Biswas is an author, blogger, animal-lover, spiritualist. Her work is represented by Ed Wilson from the Johnson & Alcock agency. When not pottering about with her plants or her aquariums, you can find her nose deep in a book, or baking up a storm.